The Ghost of Trofim Lysenko is Smiling

When science is corrupted by politics, it's no longer science

If they handed out an award for “scientist whose ideas have resulted in the most suffering and death in human history,” Trofim Denisovich Lysenko would be a solid contender.

In Stalin’s USSR, Trofim Lysenko WAS #TheScience

I first learned about Lysenko and “Lysenkoism” back in the distant past of my undergrad days which—I am dating myself here—was just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. I remember feeling sad for the people whose lives had been ruined by Lysenko, but also feeling just a teensy bit smug and superior in my assumption that such idiocy could never happen here in the West. In the West, my naive younger self believed, a pseudoscientific nutbar like Lysenko would be laughed at as he was being summarily discredited. In the West we would always look at the evidence. Conduct experiments. Engage in lively debate. Try to keep the politics out of it. Change our minds if the data showed that our original hypothesis was wrong.

For obvious reasons, I am no longer feeling so smug. Looking at science now, in 2023, I can only assume that the ghost of Lysenko is smiling. We would do well to remind ourselves of his story.

Lysenko was born to a peasant family in what is now Ukraine in 1898. He was reportedly illiterate until the age of 13 but took advantage of educational opportunities for peasants in the early days of the Soviet Union and trained as an agronomist in the 1920’s. In Stalin’s USSR he quickly rose through the ranks, not because he was particularly gifted but because of his identity group:

By the late 1920s, the USSR's leaders had given their support to Lysenko. This support was a consequence, in part, of policies put in place by the Communist Party to rapidly promote members of the proletariat into leadership positions in agriculture, science and industry. Party officials were looking for promising candidates with backgrounds similar to Lysenko's: born of a peasant family, without formal academic training or affiliations to the academic community.[31] Due to close partnership between Stalin and Lysenko, Lysenko acquired an influence over genetics in the Soviet Union during the early and mid twentieth century.

The problem is, his “science” was largely junk, and the theories he espoused were based more on their concordance with Marxist ideology than with physical reality.

At the core of Lysenko’s pseudoscience was a wholesale rejection of Mendelian genetics in favour of Lamarckism—the now discredited idea that acquired traits could be passed on to the next generation. Essentially, plant growth was not determined by genetics but rather (like good Marxists) plants were blank slates which could be trained to behave as The Party wished. As historian K.Lee Lerner has noted:

Under Lysenko, Mendelian genetics was branded "decadent" and scientists that who rejected Lamarckism in favor of natural selection were denounced as "enemies of the Soviet people." Lysenko's supporters even denied the existence of chromosomes and genes were denounced as "bourgeois constructs"…

Enamored with the political acceptability and alleged scientific merit of Lysenko's ideas, Stalin took matters one step further by personally attacking modern genetics as counter- revolutionary or bourgeois science. While the rest of the scientific world could not conceive of understanding evolution without genetics, Stalin's Soviet Union used its political power to suppress rational scientific inquiry. Under Stalin, science was made to serve political ideology….

For a generation, Soviet scientists were forced to shun conventional genetics and advances in biology published in the West in favor of the discarded Lamarckian ideas.… An exploration of man's power over nature, rather than understanding the realities of nature, became the focus of theoretical development.

Although crop yields continued to decline, Soviets leaders refused to take responsibility or place the blame where it belonged. Lysenko's programs were considered politically correct and that was more important than the thousands dying of famine.

In the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s in the Soviet Union, if you opposed Lysenko you opposed science itself (sound familiar?)—and for that you could be cancelled in the most egregious ways. Talented and truth-seeking scientists were exiled, tortured, imprisoned and in some cases killed for the sin of promoting politically incorrect scientific “misinformation.” Many more self-censored or participated in the lie:

In literal fear of their lives, many Soviet scientists cowered. Some presented fraudulent data to support Lysenko, others destroyed evidence that showed he was utterly wrong. It was not uncommon to read the public letters of scientists who had once advanced Mendelian genetics in which they confessed the errors of their ways and then extolled the wisdom of the Party.

One might think that demanding ideological purity in the relatively obscure field of plant genetics would have few repercussions beyond the confines of academia. But in fact, as Lysenko lied, people died. By the millions. As Louis K Bonham has observed:

With dissent from Lysenkoism outlawed (indeed, the science of genetics was officially proclaimed to be antinationalist and pseudobiology), Lysenko’s crackpot ideas became official Soviet agricultural policy. This led to predictable results: implementation of his theories led to the famines of the 1930s that killed tens of millions in the Soviet Union. When Mao adopted them in 1958, the result was the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-62, in which 15 million people died.

Soviet propaganda extolled the incredible yields that came from #followingthescience of Lysenkoism

The reality of Lysendo’s agriculture policy was much different than the propaganda. These are survivors of low agricultural production in Kazakhstan

Instead of recognizing the catastrophe unfolding in front of them, Lysenko’s followers doubled down and insisted that the Soviet population deny the reality of their own eyes and ears:

The entire agricultural research infrastructure of the Soviet Union -- a country with millions who lives teetered on starvation -- was devoted to a disproved scientific hypothesis and inventive methods were used to falsely prove that there was no famine and that crop yields were actually on the rise.

As mark Twain famously said, “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” Although it’s easy enough to dismiss Lysenkoism as a sort of historical anomaly, how can we scoff at Marxists denying the reality of genetic inheritance when some of our major medical schools, under the guise of “social justice,” are now denying the reality of biological sex? When any explanation of race or sex differences as being attributable to anything other than oppression is verboten, even if it is factually correct?

I’m certainly not the first to point out the parallels between the Marxist hatred of “bourgeois” values and the political left’s disdain for “whiteness” and “the patriarchy,” nor the parallels between Stalinist purges and modern academic “cancel culture.” We are not at the point of throwing people in the Gulag (at least not yet, although vaguely defined “hate speech” laws in several Western countries make this increasingly likely in the not so distant future. For example, a Norwegian woman, who is herself a lesbian, is facing a possible three year jail sentence for saying, on Facebook: “It’s just as impossible for men to become a lesbian as it is for men to become pregnant. Men are men regardless of their sexual fetishes.” )

In medicine and other professions, what is at stake is often one’s academic position or even one’s professional license. Academic departments, journals, committees and credentialing bodies such as the provincial and state medical licensing boards have been taken over, almost without exception, by zealous advocates of this new quasi-religious ideology. Those opposed to this ideology are often afraid to speak up. It reminds me of a line from WB Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

In 2021, investigative journalist Katie Herzog spoke to a group of concerned American physicians who communicate with each other secretly online.

“The dogma goes by many imperfect names,” Herzog wrote—

wokeness, social justice, critical race theory, anti-racism — but whatever it’s called, the doctors say this ideology is stifling critical thinking and dissent in the name of progress. They say that it’s turning students against their teachers and patients and racializing even the smallest interpersonal interactions. Most concerning, they insist that it is threatening the foundations of patient care, of research, and of medicine itself….

Some of these doctors say that there is a “purge” underway in the world of American medicine: question the current orthodoxy and you will be pushed out. They are so worried about the dangers of speaking out about their concerns that they will not let me identify them except by the region of the country where they work. 

“People are afraid to speak honestly,” said a doctor who immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union. “It’s like back to the USSR, where you could only speak to the ones you trust.” If the authorities found out, you could lose your job, your status, you could go to jail or worse. The fear here is not dissimilar. 

I wish I could say that things are better here in Canada, but I personally belong to three different “secret online doctor groups” and the conversation here is much the same. Early career physicians are concerned but feel they cannot risk speaking out, while those of us with less to lose are more vocal.

But it feels like we are fighting a losing battle and the purge of conservative, classical liberal, and “gender critical” voices is already well under way. As Free Speech in Medicine alumnus Bruce Pardy wrote just this week in the National Post:

The College of Psychologists of Ontario wants to re-educate Jordan Peterson for criticizing Justin Trudeau on social media. Nurse Amy Hamm is presently before a disciplinary panel of the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives for saying that biological sex is real. Numerous doctors have been sanctioned for expressing medical views contrary to official government COVID policies. Across the country, regulators are censoring, disciplining or ousting members of their professions who fail to comport with their political imperatives. A new standard of practice is emerging for Canadian professionals: be woke, be quiet, or be accused of professional misconduct.

Meanwhile, if you are on the far left of the political spectrum—and especially if you belong to a protected victim group—you can say just about anything without fear of professional repercussions—and you can get just about any pseudoscientific claptrap published. Katie Herzog highlights the case of psychiatrist Aruna Khilanani, who said —among many other egregious comments made during a Yale University School of Medicine Grand Rounds presentation entitled The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind—that she “had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor.”

We might dismiss Dr. Khilanani as an irrelevant kook had she not made her hateful comments during a grand rounds presentation at one of the most prestigious medical schools in the world. Similarly, we might dismiss the claim that NFL football is a nexus of violence perpetrated against black men as “fringe” if it had not appeared in the once prestigious pages of Scientific American. Sadly, the major scientific journals — like the credentialing bodies and the academic departments — have fallen, one after the other, to the new Lysenkoism. Here is the cover of a recent issue of the Lancet, once (and perhaps still, officially) the top-rated medical journal in the world:

The story of Trofim Lysenko should have taught us that suppressing scientific debate for ideological reasons leads to bad science and, eventually, catastrophe. Sadly it appears that we have failed to learn from history and may be condemned to repeat it.

On a positive note, the folks over at Minding the Campus have begun awarding the Trofim Lysenko Award for the Suppression of Academic Speech. The inaugural trophy was awarded to Williams College Professor Phoebe Cohen for her prominent role in disinviting geophysics professor Adrian Abbot from giving a keynote speech at MIT, not because there was anything wrong with his physics research, but because he had publicly opposed raced-based college admissions and hiring policies (notably, an opinion shared by the majority of Americans). In an interview with the New York Times about the cancellation of Dr. Abbot, professor Cohen predictably stated:

“This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated.”

Congratulations on your award, professor Cohen. Lysenko may have been a white man, but he was a kindred spirit. And his ghost is smiling at you.